Last Friday I made my second-ever visit to the Morgan Library & Museum. The Morgan, which began as the private library of Pierpont Morgan, father of J.P Morgan, is now a complex of buildings that houses rare books and materials, and even includes a performance space. Admission is a bit pricey, but it’s free on Friday nights between 7 and 9 p.m., and when I was there they had a pair of musicians playing in the courtyard, near the café.
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Tag: museum (page 2 of 2)
For my next entry in what may become a series on museums that are easier to visit when you have a car, I’d like to present the New York Hall of Science. We’re coming up on a holiday weekend, you probably have spare time on your hands, so why not check out New York’s less well known science museum? And if you arrive on a Sunday, from September through June, between 10 and 11 a.m., admission is free.
I am fairly certain that I have taken almost every person who has visited me since I moved to NYC to the main branch New York Public Library, also known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman building. My reasons are simple: It’s in a great location near other tourist outings (Bryant Park, Grand Central, Rockefeller Center, and Times Square are all nearby), I love libraries and this is a particularly beautiful one, and, of course, it’s free.
When my alarm went off this morning, I awoke to Light FM playing Christmas music—Transiberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Eve in Sarajevo”, to be exact. I groaned, partly because it felt too early for Christmas music, but mostly because I didn’t want to get up yet. It’d be hypocritical of me to really be annoyed when I was excited to realize one of my favorite new holiday traditions kicked off today.
A few years ago I visited the American Museum of Natural History just after New Years, and on that visit I was introduced to the Origami Tree. For the last forty years, volunteers have folded hundreds of origami objects and used them to decorate a Christmas tree within the museum. Last year the tree featured various groups of animals—herds, flights, even a parliament of owls. Another year the tree honored the collections of the museum and had everything from dinosaurs to space shuttles.
I’ve already suggested visiting the Cloisters, but now I have to urge you: visit the Cloisters before December 8. If you do, you’ll be able to visit an installation which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.
Janet Cardiff, a multimedia artist who I’m definitely going to look up and learn more about, created a piece called The Forty Part Motet. It’s a recording of Thomas Tallis’s 16th century motet for forty voices, but it’s not your typical choral recording. It is split into forty separate recordings, representing the forty voices, across forty speakers arranged in a circle inside a 12th century chapel at the Cloisters.
When you live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, going to Queens is terrible. It involves multiple subway lines, or, probably (I’ve never tried it!), multiple buses. But there are a couple places I’ve been to in Queens that make the effort absolutely worth it—even if I do try to time my visits to when my family (or friends), who have a car, are in town.
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